


Dribs and Drabs

by PanBoleyn



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, M/M, Other, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-05-17 23:02:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14840876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanBoleyn/pseuds/PanBoleyn
Summary: A collection of ficlets, mostly off tumblr.Multiple pairings, multiple universes.





	1. "You Smell Like A Wet Dog." (SilverFlint)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted here [at my tumblr](http://eidetictelekinetic.tumblr.com/post/174099464590/silverflint-58-d%22%22)

“You smell like a wet dog.” 

 

John glared at James as he ducked inside the cabin, and for that he flung his wet jacket at him. To his delight, it caught James full in the face, and he yanked it off, scowling. John smiled back, faux-sweetly. “Well, some of us had to be out in the rain, we can’t all hole up in a cabin under the excuse of plotting a next move.” 

 

“I am plotting our course,” James pointed out, watching John with a mixture of amusement and irritation that shifted to worry as John settled on the hanging cot, biting his lip as he tried to remove his peg. “Are you all right?” 

 

“I’m fine.” 

 

“John.” 

 

John looked up, and now James could see the exhaustion written all over his face. He got up, dropping down onto the cot next to John as the peg thudded to the deck. John sighed, and after a moment let himself tip sideways against James. “I hate storms at sea. Just, for the record. I fucking hate them.”

 

“If you weren’t so stubborn…” 

 

“Pot, kettle,  _a chroi_ ,” John murmured, and as ever, James wondered what the endearment meant, what language it was in. But pressing had never gotten him anywhere, so he stayed quiet instead as John’s head came to rest heavy on his shoulder. The damp curls left his shirt wet, but James decided to ignore that. One didn’t get through a day on a ship without getting wet one way or another. 

 

“You can’t fall asleep in those wet things, idiot,” he said, the insult coming out more affectionate than anything else. 

 

“I think I can survive a cold.” 

 

“I’m not sure I can survive you ill and grumpy.” Or what might happen if the sickness became serious. There’d been far too much of that. 

 

“I think you’re just trying to get me out of my clothes.” 

 

“When was the last time I needed an excuse for that?” James asked, nudging John to sit up again. “Come on then. Get out of those and you can sleep.”

 

John tugged off his wet shirt and left it on the floor, then got to his single foot, holding onto the cot’s rope as he shimmied out of his trousers. James supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised when John found one of his own overlarge white shirts to pull on instead before he laid down and looked back up. “Are you staying, or going back to work?”

 

He should go back to his charts and maps. He really should. And yet, he’s tired too. And those blue eyes were far more compelling than they ought to be… 

 

Neither of them stirred until the sun was high the next morning.


	2. "I Used To Do A Lot Of Things." (SilverFlintHamiltons)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A happy little ot4 post-canon moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted here [at my tumblr](http://eidetictelekinetic.tumblr.com/post/174133931385/i-used-to-do-a-lot-of-things-your-choice-of)

“You know, I used to -” 

 

“Stop,” James cuts John off, lightly whacking the back of John’s head as he passes by. “Half of those stories are tall tales anyway.” 

 

“I’ll have you know I used to do a lot of things, and actually did them!” John replies, doing his very best to look affronted when the smirk on James’ face only made him want to giggle.

 

“Out of curiosity, how many of those things were legal?” Thomas and Miranda are lying in the grass, and it’s Thomas speaking, propping himself up on his elbows. John had been wary of Thomas Hamilton once upon a time (this is a world where Miranda lived, a world where John fell into the orbit of a captain and a witch and could not keep this secret from them both) and sometimes his sharp aristocrat’s voice gets the Irish up in John, but it’s too nice a day for that. 

 

“Where’s the fun in legalities? And might I remind you, _my lord_ , that you were perfectly happy to learn how to pick locks from me just last week, so let’s not get too picky about legal things.”

 

“Oh, is that why the shed door is no longer catching properly?” Miranda asks, not making any move to look up from the book she’s reading, laid out on her stomach in the grass. 

 

“Er, no, that one’s my fault, I might have slammed it too hard,” James admits, and John bursts out laughing when Miranda’s response to this is to tug up a fistful of grass and throw it at James’ head. It mostly lands on Thomas because grass doesn’t exactly travel far, and his surprised grumbles as he tries to get it out of his hair are more than worth the glare John gets from him in response. 

 

“You’ll pay for that later,” Thomas threatens, and John shrugs, eyeing James who is sitting now with what looks like a wide journal. 

 

“Maybe, maybe not,” he says cheerfully, getting off his stool to stretch out in the grass himself. “For now, though, I think we’ve become James’ latest models, so we’d best behave. 

 

Later, after Thomas ensures that John does indeed pay for his laughter and James has distracted Miranda very thoroughly from her book, the charcoal sketch goes in a frame to hang on their bedroom wall, along with the collection that already exists, snapshots of life in charcoal and oils, watercolors and pencil. 


	3. Things You Said When You Thought I Was Asleep (SilverFlint)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [on my tumblr](http://eidetictelekinetic.tumblr.com/post/173468057145/12-flint-and-silver)
> 
> Minor Flint/Hamilton and hints of future SilverFlintHamilton in this one.

The first time, John is cautious. It’s only the third time they’ve ended up in bed together, and he knows that Flint’s a light sleeper. It’s dark in the hut they share on Maroon Island, but a crack in the wall lets in just a little moonlight, spilling over Flint’s face. John, choking awake on silent screams as he so often does, finds he’s calmed, watching him. Laying his head on Flint’s chest, the sound of his heartbeat chases away the ghosts of long-past horrors.  _“Is brea liom tu,”_  he whispers into the dark.

 

He doesn’t see Flint’s eyes open, doesn’t see his face crinkle in the dark - but John said it in Irish, in the tongue his father insisted they speak at home, just in case such a thing happened, anyway. _I love you_ , he says in the language of a man who was cruel and didn’t know love at all, yet it is still John’s language too.

 

 _I love you_ , he tells Flint in a way his captain will never understand. That’s all right, John doesn’t understand his heart himself.

 

<><><>

 

The second time, things have been tense between them. John knows that James is trying to understand why John won’t discuss his past. He also knows that James is failing to do so. For James, sharing past is the ultimate expression of trust. For John, offering his present, his future, that is trust. He wonders sometimes if they can last, when they see the world so differently. 

 

He cannot tell James the truth because some of it may turn the fondness in his eyes to disgust - or worse, to pity. Will he want to touch a man who was a boy just a little too pretty on merchant voyages a tad too long, a boy who looked too much like his dead mother in the haze of opium -

 

And some, he cannot speak for fear he will cry, or scream, and never stop even if James is understanding enough to try and hold him. But James is turned away from him in the night - they have gone from fucking to something soft enough John had dared to think of it as making love, but now they are back to fucking and it hurts. 

 

“My name is Sean. I was born in Belfast. I had a brother, a sister, and a twin, and I lost them. I lost everyone. “He closes his eyes, silent tears creeping down his cheeks in the darkness. “I cannot lose you too.  _Te amo, corazón_ ,” he says,  _I love you_ , again, this time in the Spanish of his mother. 

 

He buries his face in the pillow and doesn’t see the shadow sit up beside him in the dark.

 

<><><>

 

They find out about the plantation by chance - one of Rackham’s men, going through Max’s papers. It is Madi who suggests that the men there might be useful recruits to their cause. “They have known enough of what we know of this world to be interested, don’t you think?”

 

They find the plantation, and James finds his world, in a miracle made bittersweet only because he lived to see it and Miranda did not. He has two days with Thomas, two unreal breathless giddy days before Madi nearly knocks down his cabin door, she knocks so hard. “John is here too,” is all she says, and this impossible dream becomes all the more impossible because if Thomas is his world John must be his night sky, constellations he hasn’t learned the myths of but desperately wants to. 

 

John is here too - “Juan Arroyo,” Thomas says, “that’s his name, I rather like him, actually, once he’s better we’ll have much to discuss” - but he’s ill. Stubborn as ever, his leg’s infected again, and James watches him sleep, restless with fever dreams. He tangles a hand in those dark curls, shorn short in an attempt to ‘civilize’ John, presumably. They shaved his beard too, he looks so young, so easily broken in his sleep. “I love you, damn it. You need to wake up,  _Sean_. I heard you, I knew the Spanish if not the other, so you need to wake up and get the nerve to tell me to my face. You hear me?” 

 

Three days later, he does, and…

 

Well. There is much to discuss, but it’s a first step.


	4. No One Here To Hold Me, No One That I Owe (John Silver and his daemon, pre-canon)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one's not off my tumblr, it's part of a larger piece meant for my daemon verse that... no longer works as a whole fic quite as I'd structured. This is still a good prologue for the John of that verse, though, the rest of which [can be found here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/874386)

 

There is a man, and he’s back in Belfast, his daemon an ermine draped over his shoulders. He used to be called Sean Teagan, but he hasn’t used that name since Russia, 1705, when sharing a surname with his dead uncle turned out to be useful. On the ship he just left, he was calling himself Nicholas Smith, which is really a boring name. “I should try something more interesting, don’t you think, Iri?” 

  
  


“I think we need to get out of this town,” Irial says grumpily, and truthfully, Sean agrees with her. 

  
  


(Sean, for lack of a better name, as he is between aliases for the moment.)

  
  


“We will, as soon as we find a ship to the New World.” New World, new start, Sean thinks. 

  
  


“We could have done that from Amsterdam,” Irial says, grumpy, and Sean sighs, reaching up to pet her hair. “We didn’t have to come here.” 

  
  


“No, I suppose we didn’t,” says Sean Teagan who will try to claim, months from now on an island across the sea, that his past is irrelevant. He will say it in hopes of making it true, just as he has come back to Belfast for the same reason. He is here hoping his ghosts can be banished, hoping that he can leave here and never be haunted by it again.

  
  


It’s been eighteen years but his feet still know the way to the tavern and its upstairs rooms where he was born. 

  
  


It’s still a tavern. For a moment, Sean looks at the man behind the bar, but his hair is fiery red and his hands are long-fingered and slender, deft with glasses and bottles yet he thinks those hands don’t lash out to strike the boy and girl with the same red hair who are cleaning up for their da. He thinks they don’t reach out in a kind of gentleness more horrifying than the violence.

  
  


He gets one drink. Just one. Liam Devlin - Sean knows him, after all, this son of his father’s sister, they came to visit twice even though they lived in Derry - looks him up and down, looks hard at him, his magpie daemon chirping. Liam looks at Sean with eyes the same striking blue as his own, for they both have the Teagan eyes, but he says nothing. They just look at each other, and Sean pays for his drink and smiles when he overhears a man at one of the tables talking about how he needs a Spanish translator for his next voyage. 

  
  


He picks up his glass and strides over, and he feels Liam’s eyes on his back. This is the place where Padraig Teagan and his firebrand of a brother Declan tried and failed to start a revolution. This is where Padraig was shot in the head, where his elder daughter ran and his firstborn son was arrested. This is where the twin boy and girl he despised were knocked out and dragged off. And this man, of course, is Padraig’s son, what if he tries to start something?

  
  


The past always matters, but Sean doesn’t want it to, as he sits down across from a man whose name is Captain Parrish and says with a smile, “I speak excellent Spanish, Captain, if you’re interested.”

  
  


(This is true, because this child of Belfast had a Spanish mother, and a sister who felt duty-bound to carry on the teachings. This is true, because Sean Teagan was Alejandro Cortez in Toledo for a year and a half before he was run out of town, one name of dozens, one mask of many.)

  
  


The man who has not been Sean Teagan in ten years, who will not be John Silver for a few more weeks, leaves his father’s tavern with a new job that will get him to the New World. He doesn’t know much about the Caribbean and cares less. “It’s something different, somewhere with no stains,” he tells his daemon as they walk away. Irial says nothing, because her side is streaked with gold in every shape she takes, and she understands as her human does not that some stains are like scars, and never leave.

  
  


There is one thing he does, in the dead of night, before he leaves. There is a building on the outskirts of town, that was once called St. John’s. They called it an orphanage, and never told a soul of what was done to the children there. How they  _ studied  _ the bond between daemon and human, in the name of the Church of England. And if they somehow damned the children’s souls? They were Catholic, or Presbyterian, or Jewish, or newly-come slave children who still whispered prayers to gods from home - their souls were already at risk if not doomed so what harm was done?

  
  


He would like to set the whole building alight. But he cannot know if there are still children there who do not deserve that. He’d happily watch every single adult burn alive for what they had been willing to do, but not the children. 

  
  


Sean Teagan and his daemon walk away from the place that ruined them, and in three days’ time they’re on a ship to the New World, hopefully leaving Belfast behind forever.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flint had been drunk, after all.

Silver doesn’t tell him. He doesn’t know how. He doesn’t really think it matters. 

Flint had been drunk, after all. 

It’s not the first time Silver’s been called the wrong name in bed. He’d never officially been any kind of prostitute - by which he means he never worked for a brothel, or anything like that. But sex, until recently, had only ever been another tool in the arsenal. 

He’s fairly sure a few of the people who took him to bed picked him for looking like someone - or looking the exact opposite. 

A wrong name is fine. Even with Flint, it would’ve been fine. 

_ “Everything’s wrong but your eyes,” _ he’d said, and what Silver guesses from that is that Thomas Hamilton’s eyes were blue, and there’s only been two people he’s gone to bed with because he’d wanted to. And one of them doesn’t even want him (what does he want then, a distraction?), not really. As a second best, fine, a makeshift bedmate, but… 

(If Silver ever got drunk, this would all come spilling out, and Flint would be quick to set the matter straight. Trouble is, Silver never gets drunk, and Flint doesn’t know he said it.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come chat over at my tumblr, http://eidetictelekinetic.tumblr.com!

**Author's Note:**

> Like what you see? 
> 
> Prompt me over [at my tumblr](http://eidetictelekinetic.tumblr.com/ask)


End file.
